* Lots of people are going to be on current and previous versions of IE for years to come, no matter how many hours you put in.
* People enjoy finding clever ways around constraints, and I'm not sure those same man-hours would be available for your alternative tasks.
* IMHO, JS really isn't so bad.
These micro-languages (that compiles to JS) try to solve the same fundamental problems that exist in JavaScript, which mostly are syntactic or semantic in nature. But there are some solutions and implementations that will likely help further the development of ECMAScript, so the man-hours spent on creating them aren't all lost.